I've been killing time this weekend running a metric ton of MOJO freebie CDs through the laptop. There's a lot of chaff to sift through, but there's also a lot of great stuff.

Hats off to Mr. Iggy Pop for his selections on the STOOGES JUKEBOX disc from 2007. Every last selection is a killer. Not a single lousy tune. Great vibe to the entire affair. Even the Last Poets thing, which inadvertently evokes the rancid air of a college poetry slam at a coffee house only lasts a minute. No sweat there. I have no problem with righteous anger ... when it's merited.

EDITORIAL NOTE TO MOJOfficers: Much better to let artists spin the original version of the tune than mangle it via a cover version. I'm still trying to devise a suitably horrific and fitting death for that stinks-on-ice Dark Side Of The Moon / Wish You Were Here travesty. You know I haven't picked up a copy of your magazine since then?

(Just in case you were wondering why your circulation numbers have consistently been down by one).

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I bring this up because I cannot remember if I've ever asked y'all what your selections would be for a one-CD "Trouser Press" freebie if there ever were to be one made. One disc to capture the essence of the whole shooting match. A ton of good stuff is going to get left off. This isn't a Noah's Ark proposition. More like Noah's Kayak.

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Based on the website imagery, you know that there would be a Ramones tune. Probably some Elvis Costello. Nirvana? Likely.

But MOBY? We've only got one CD to work with here. I'd vote for a Neubauten tune before I'd spare any room for Moby.

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The Clash?
R.E.M.?
Talking Heads?
Husker Du?
Madonna?
Bonzos?

It's kind of a painful thought process to dwell on, actually.

What would be intersting to me would be to have every song on every album in the TP in a rankable database and see how it all stacks up after some sort of review process. Then I could compare those results to my own list. It might provoke outrage.

Seems a near-impossible task to assemble the TP All-Star cd, Kay, though I agree that it would probably have to contain the Clash, R.E.M., and HuDu (teach me how to do an umlaut, Delvin!). I'd also insist on a Minutemen song, and I nominate "Jesus and Tequila."

I was still buying - and recording onto - blank cassettes until maybe two years ago and I've got a ton of those TDK SA-90s. Over the years, I've been trying to acquire CD and vinyl versions of the records I only otherwise had on cassette. I've got some tapes that are still holding up after nearly 30 years and dozens (hundreds?) of plays, but some of 'em are getting kinda dodgy.

Rhett, some of my favorite artists I have only ever owned on cassette tape. I own no CDs or any other format for The Clash, David Bowie, Prince, Led Zeppelin etc. Also, the innumerable mixtapes my friends and ex-wife made for me, and all the punk rock 45's I ripped onto cassette tape are personal treasures. The tapes are holding up OK, but I keep buying $5 boom boxes at yard sales to play them and these shit the bed. Maybe I should give in (about 25 years too late) and buy a decent cassette component for my stereo.

I've got two cassette components with my home stereo (to be able to dub tapes) and another with the other stereo in the basement/mancave/playroom. I believe I bought one of those decks off Craigslist for about $10 and have seen them for about that price at Goodwill. So yes, make the investment, fella.

Back in the 80s, I used to listen to a college radio station in northeastern Pennsylvania that had a few fairly decent shows. Not perfect, but good.

I'm nearly certain that somewhere in a mythical box full of old tapes, I have a cassette with a recording of a certain DJ from a certain show who followed up an otherwise awesome "goth block" of Bauhaus tunes with some banter wherein he mentions that their singer "Peter Baumann" had gone solo.

"Baumannhaus?

Every other Thursday (when I can remember to do so) I quite figuratively get down on my knees and thank my lucky stars that this howling bit of misinformation never passed my lips.

What a mighty faux-pas that would have been. It couldn't have been more than a year before the truth was revealed to me. I wish I could say with certainty that it had been a Trouser Press Epiphany, but it was more likely SPIN. Still, it could have been.

Those were the days. Of course, there was no such thing as wikipedia back then. Tell that to kids these days and they won't believe you.

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Thanks to the same radio show, I also went along for several months (at least) thinking that Joy Division had covered a tune by The Velvet Underground called "Sister A." Luckily, I could still be making that mistake verbally to this very day and no one would ever know any better.

> Thanks to the same radio show, I also went along for several months (at least) thinking that
> Joy Division had covered a tune by The Velvet Underground called "Sister A."

Aha! The link between the Velvets, Joy Division and Radiohead!

Don't feel too bad, Kay. Thanks to a guy who wrote music reviews for our local newspaper, I toddled along for at least a couple months thinking that "Sister Ray" was a Doors song.

The guy was writing a review of Still, read the name Morrison in the credits for that song, and just jumped to the conclusion. I hadn't yet heard the Velvets (whose albums all were out of print at the time), so I didn't know any better either, and just took his word for it.

It wasn't until I bought Still, a month or two later, that I realized something was amiss. I had no idea who Reed, Tucker and Cale were, but I knew they weren't the other three Doors.

Curious epilogue: The reviewer turned out to be the son of one of my college professors. The professor became a friend of mine, and in turn, so did his son. Before long, I made the connection. One evening over drinks, I mentioned that review. As soon as I said "Joy Division," he became massively embarrassed (which wasn't my intent), admitting that he'd gotten the credit for "Sister Ray" totally, humiliatingly wrong.